


Staring in the blackness at some distant star

by bellofthetolppl



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (im not), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, References to Depression, So much angst, angst though, bell and clarke living till they are older and having a grandkid, this is so sad it's really goddarn sad i am so sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 19:03:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18817108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellofthetolppl/pseuds/bellofthetolppl
Summary: Bellamy and Clarke make it past their thirties and get to have a family, a cabin, a camp full of happy delinquents. They get to grow old, raise their children, even have grand kids. But growing old together turns out to be as much of a false statement as "forever" and "happily ever after".





	Staring in the blackness at some distant star

**Author's Note:**

> Well...I like pain, I think you all know that by now.

Clarke Griffin dies when she’s just fifty-six years old. Bellamy is sixty-one at the time and if he’s being honest, neither of them thought she’d be the first to go. They’d just welcomed their first grandchild to the world a year back-a beautiful girl called Lea, the daughter of their only son Gus, when it all happened. 

Bellamy took it the hardest of course. 

He never thought he’d live to see a day when they both made it over thirty and yet they did. 

They became a family, raised Madi, then Gus, he expanded their cabin, their camp was blooming more than ever, they were happy. 

Forever was a long time, they didn’t want forever, they never even dared wish for a forever, but they grew to appreciate their happiness and hoped to spent a few good years like this. Together. 

Years turned into a decade, Gus grew, moved away to a village near Polis, had a kid, followed in his mother’s footsteps and became a medic. Madi married to a woman in the far western lands, in a village near the last of the Trishanakru border territories and was basically in charge of the entire settlement.

Bellamy and Clarke were left with their dog, Ares, Clarke’s stubborn horse Diane,(a name that somehow didn’t suit her or so he believed), and the small garden in their backyard that they nourished, ploughed and sowed. 

Clarke was still working in medbay, lying to herself and to him that she’d cut down on her shifts soon because her back wasn’t holding her and the headaches that were a constant part of her life in the past five years had worsened but both he and her knew it was a lie. 

Bellamy had stepped down from running the guards but he still did the schedules, participated in training exercised, went out hunting and more often than not lately, helped Monty with their farm. 

He’d actually been the one whose health had rapidly deteriorated the winter before her death. He had gone through a bad case of pneumonia that left him shaky and unstable for months after. 

Then early in the spring, his heart had gotten so out of rhythm, Clarke and Abby both insisted on keeping him in medbay for a week despite his numerous protests on the matter. 

All Clarke had to say was “You almost had a heart attack, Bellamy!” to which he’d respond with a loud annoyed groan and pout like a child. 

She was so worried over him that she completely ignored herself. He remembers now how she was there for him every time he as much as coughed or overworked himself or felt anxious about something. 

So when Murphy comes running one day in the middle of the wheat fields, looking for him, yelling his name, saying Clarke passed outside medbay, he surely doesn’t expect it. 

Nor does he want to believe it.

He runs there as fast as he can and finds her lying on the ground, the left part of her body twisted in an unnatural position, she tries talking but all that comes out are muffled words so she just looks at him. 

They’ve always been better at understanding each other when they look into each other’s eyes instead of using words. He grabs her hand and holds it tight. 

Jackson is on her other side and when he looks at him he knows….he knows. And Clarke does too.

She pulls his hand as much as she can and makes him look at her again. He picks her in his arms and holds her close.

“It’s okay, princess, it’s okay. I’m here…I’m here.” she wants to smile, he can see it, but she can’t. 

Her mouth is twisted so unnaturally, so unlike her. 

“Jackson, please” he begs but he just shakes his head. “Please, please do something! Please, someone do something!” he yells out into the void. There is a crowd gathered around them, all of the delinquents, all of the kids they adopted what seems like decades ago. 

“Clarke, Clarke, please…please stay, please.” he begs and she keeps looking at him. Her breathing’s shallow, she’s trying to stay with him, he can tell, but it’s not up to her, not this time “Hold on! Hold on, I’m here, princess. I’m never letting you go.”

She pulls his hand again-she needs him to lean down and he does. 

With her last strength her makes out a word.

“Together.” she says. 

He cries, the tears fall down on her face, then her body goes limp in his arms and her eyes stare lifelessly at the sky. 

He holds her and cries, he doesn’t know what’s happening really, what all this is, but he holds her and he begs her to talk to him, kisses her forehead, her lips, cups her still warm cheeks, cries and cries and yells for help until they have to physically separate him from her. 

He fights them. He fights them with as much strength as he has until Jackson has to come and stick a needle in his neck to put him out because he was hurting himself and the others trying to help him.

He wakes up in bed and when he doesn’t find her next to him he checks the kitchen, the garden, even the nursery-hell, maybe she’s talking to Gus in the other room or feeding Ares.

Except he doesn’t. The rooms are empty, the backyard, the garden-all hauntingly quiet. 

He doesn’t know what happens next, he barely has any memory of it. He knows Jackson comes by and tells him they couldn’t have done anything, that it was a massive stroke and nothing could’ve prevented it. 

He doesn’t believe him, knowing he should’ve paid attention to her more, made sure she rested, took her to her mom because of her headaches, made her take tests. 

But he didn’t. Because he was selfish. Because he was sick and weak and she was the one caring for him. He lost her because of his own stupid self and he’ll never forgive himself.

At the funeral he’s a mess.

He passes out just after the service is over and wakes up in his bed. 

Again.

He grows to hate it-every time he loses consciousness, he wakes up there, alone. Without her. Though the pillows and she sheets still smell like her, she’s not there. She never will be again.

Gus and Madi both come, they try to talk to him but he can’t utter a word. 

He wants to say something but he literally physically can’t make himself say anything. He knows he’s disappointing them too, he realizes they are worried but when he tries to even give them a fake one liner like “I’m fine”and “You should both go back to your families” he can’t. He just can’t.

He stops sleeping in their bed. 

Every night, the kids and Jackson help him there and close the door and every time he waits for them to stop eavesdropping on him, so he can move on the floor and cry. 

Bellamy cries so much, his head feels like splitting but he welcomes the pain-maybe he’d give himself a stroke too.

He’s surprised his heart even lasted that long considering everything. 

He can’t sleep. He manages ten to thirty minutes tops and then lifelessly stares at the ceiling, thinking about her, going through every memory they have then to punish himself-through every little detail that he missed which could’ve prevented all that.

In the morning, when the sun rises, he goes to her grave. His steps are slow, wobbly, he’s barely keeping himself on his feet. He can’t remember when he last ate, he only knows Gus keeps bringing him soup just like Bellamy did when he was little and sick. 

But Bellamy wasn’t sick. And he didn’t need anyone taking care of him. He would never let it happen again, not after this. 

So he makes himself walk to her grave, he sits down, touches the stone and cries. Often, they find him asleep there on the ground, with the sun burning his cheeks or the rain pouring down on him. 

He can’t recall even half of it, he knows the kids leave, they have to. Gus had a one year old at home and Madi couldn’t expect the village to run itself. Some nights he can recall someone’s strong hands dragging him back to his cabin. 

It took him a week to realize it was their friends making sure he’s fine-Monty, Harper, Murphy, Miller, Jasper, Jackson-they were all trying to pull him back from the edge.

He tried to push them away, but one person would never leave. The person he wouldn’t expect at all.

Murphy.

He’d come to the cabin early every morning, because he knew that’s the time Bellamy would want to visit Clarke’s grave. 

He’d be snarky, make stupid jokes, call him an idiot like Clarke did sometimes when he would do something stupid. He wouldn’t do anything for him-he was not bringing food or clothes or dragging Jackson to check on him. 

He just annoyingly followed him around. 

Murphy would stay with him by the grave all day if he had to, picking up flowers and making these little flower crowns for the kids at camp. He’d gather herbs that he gave Jackson when they came back or he’d even catch squirrels or go by the river for a fish that he disgustingly ate raw while he waited for Bellamy to be done. 

Sometimes it’d take a day, other times a few hours. 

There were weeks when Bellamy couldn’t stay for more than ten minutes because he got so disgusted with himself for causing her death that he couldn’t bare being there. 

He’d instead wander the woods, go so deep in them, Murphy had to pull him by the collar and make him turn into another direction. 

Other days he’d hunt-he needed to release all the anger he had in him. He’d always aim for boars, though, never deer or rabbits or anything else-boars. When Murphy asked why, he would just shrug-he still couldn’t make himself talk-and that’d be enough for his friend. 

Sometimes he’d be in so much pain he’d just bang his fists in the trees and cry himself till he passed out. He would wake up to Murphy wrapping his knuckles in gauze and telling him he’s a goddamn idiot. 

One day they were in the woods again, Bellamy was sitting on the ground crying when Murphy was patching his knuckles-he had split them open so many times, he had scars that would never disappear now.

“You know you have to stop this, right?” he said, putting his hands on his shoulders, gripping them tightly. “Bellamy, look at me.” he did, he met someone else’s eyes for the first time since Clarke died.

“You need to stop.If not for you then for me, for the kids. Gus and Madi are going nuts, radioing me every night to ask me how you are. Jasper and Monty are acting like they’re seventeen and virgin again and need guidance by an old man and Emori won’t stop nagging me to keep an eye on you because she loved Clarke.” he huffs.

“I can’t have that, it’s killing me.”

He pushes Murphy’s hands away. 

“Then stop!” he’s trying to say but no words come out of his mouth.

“I can’t stop.” Bellamy raises an eyebrow in confusion.

“I can’t stop cause I love you, you idiot. You’re my best friend in case you haven’t noticed and all the kids even if they’re like fifty now and definitely no longer kids, they love you and adore you and they’d shoot me on the spot if you did something stupid to yourself, okay?”

Bellamy shakes his head.

“No! Listen, I know it’s hard but you have to-”

“It’s my fault” Bellamy utters the words that he’s been replaying over and over in his head for months since her death now. “It’s my fault. I…I” his voice is so shaky, so quiet, he’s not sure he’s the one speaking. 

After all, he hasn’t used it in forever. “I should’ve paid more attention to her, I should’ve taken care of her” the tears stream down his face and he looks away ashamed.

“Sure. You could’ve” Murphy’s words surprise him and his head snaps back “But it still wouldn’t have changed anything. This is not something you could’ve prevented.”

“I-”

“No, no matter what you say, it doesn’t change anything. She’s gone. And I know it hurts you but what you’ve been doing yourself for months now” he shakes his head “She wouldn’t like that and I think you’ll agree with me here. If Clarke was standing where I am now, she’d give you the speech of the century.”

“What would she say?” Bellamy asks sheepishly, desperate to imagine her right here with them. 

“Well, first of all, she’d kick your ass that’s for one, like literally kick your ass.” Bellamy smiles at that “Then she’d tell you you’re being stupid and selfish like you’ve never been before. Madi loves you, she’s worried sick about you and she can barely sleep and Gus is torn between coming to camp and checking on you and taking care of a one year old at home. Or did you forget about Lea, huh? Your grandchild who’s glued to you whenever she comes to visit? What about her, huh? Did you ever think about the fact she lost her grandma? That she’ll never get to remember Clarke and the person that she was or what she’s done for all of us?” 

Bellamy tears up at that. 

“Well guess what? It’s your job to make sure Lea knows all of this, okay? Your job! Not Gus, not her mom, not any of us-you! You need to visit her or take her here and spend time with her, make her breakfast, show her around, introduce her to your family, to your camp. You’re the one who needs to tuck her in and tell her stories of her brave grandma who destroyed mountains and won wars when all bets were against her, okay? You have to do that. You, Bellamy.”

He cries his heart out. He cries his shaky, broken, beating-out-of-rhythm heart out and then he lets Murphy helps him up and he goes back home.

Slowly, very very carefully, he picks himself up after that. 

He still visits Clarke’s grave every morning and he still doesn’t talk much but he tries and he lets the others hug him and console him and bring him meals or check up on him even if he hates it, even if all he wants to do is push their hands away and tell them he deserves none of it.

When he feels like he’s a little bit better, he visits Gus and spends two weeks with them. 

Lea adores him as usually, she clings onto him like a little koala bear, going everywhere with him, begging him to tell her a different fairy tale every night and waking up yelling “Gapa Bel!” which is to say grandpa bell and cries when he leaves again. 

Gus has to physically separate them and on the way home Bellamy cries too. 

When she’s four, she comes to stay with him for a month in the summer. It’s the best weeks of his life. 

He takes her to Clarke’s grave, tells her all about her and with every passing day, Lea looks more and more like Clarke. It’s like he has a stubborn miniature version of her that even has the guts to go around and scold him.

“Grandpa, you need to go to bed!” she’d say and she’d drag him to their old bedroom, even if she wasn’t tired herself or she’d be “Grandpa, we’re riding Diane tomorrow, right?”

“We are, sunshine.” he likes calling her that. Sunshine. Cause that’s what she really was-the brightest of stars in his life. The one his whole world revolved around.

“I’m not sunshine, grandpa!” she’d protest and she’d get this annoyed expression on that only Clarke had when he called her princess. “What about a knight! I’m strong! And big, right?” she’d show him the muscles on her arms and even punch him in the chest to prove her point. 

“Fine, you can be my little sunshiny knight!” he’d rub his nose against hers.

“Just knight’s fine, grandpa!” which made him chuckle.

“You know I used to call your grandma princess all the time. It really made her angry at first but then she got used to it. She even grew to love it.”

Lea would put her little hands on his cheeks and give him a serious look.

“You loved her so much, didn’t you, grandpa?”

“With my whole heart.”

“But your heart is sick or so does great grandma Abby say.” Lea would furrow her eyebrows in confusion.

“Well it doesn’t matter, kiddo. Love can not be measured anyway.”

“How come?” he puts her down and kneels on the grass next to her. 

It’s spring, the hottest one in the past decade or so. He likes thinking Clarke’s smiling down on both of them right now and the sun rays burning his back are her way of telling him he should’ve brought the sunburn cream. 

“I can tell you that I’ve loved your grandma Clarke to the moon and back, or from this valley to the Trikru’s last village, or from here to the stars in the sky.”

“Or the Milky way?”

“Or the Milky way.” he smiles and brushes a strand of hair from her face behind her ear.

“And it’d still not be enough to express it all. But-” he takes her hand and puts it on his chest, over his old slow beating heart “You feel that? That’s my love for your grandma. For as long as my heart beats, I’ll love her. And then when I pass away and meet her-” he takes her hand and puts it on her own chest, covering it with his “Yours will beat for us both, because you’ve loved us, right?” Lea nods, still looking at him with the most serious expression. 

“And on and on, it will go. Love doesn’t disappear, it just changes forms, but beats on, endlessly, stubbornly, always. Okay?”

“Okay.” Lea says and only when he smiles and pulls her to his chest, does he let a shaky breath escape his lips. 

When he pulls back, she is not smiling, though.

“Grandpa?”

“Yes, sunshine.”

“I do not want you to die.”

“It’s okay, we’ll have many more horse rides with Diane.” he promises and kisses her nose. She clings onto him though, makes him pick her up again, even though she’s not a baby anymore.

“And picnics by the river?”

“Yes.”

“With uncle Murphy?” 

“If he behaves.”

“Grandpa, he’s fifty, how can he not behave?”

“Well my dear Lea, as your grandma used to say, some people never grow up.”

“I bet she meant you.” he laughs at that and ruffles her hair “You’re too smart for your age.”

“So I’m told.”

That winter he breaks his leg. Badly. Up in the hip. He needs surgery and he has to stay off of of it for a month. 

Then he falls and twists the knee on the same bad leg because he’s too stubborn to use the crutches which makes him pretty much dependent on a cane all the time now. 

Gus wants him to move in with them but he refuses. As much as he loves having Lea around all the time, he won’t do this to them-they’re young, they’re working hard and he knows they are planning on having another kid soon. 

A grumpy old man who is nothing but a nuisance is the last thing they need. 

Moreover he can not leave their home, he can not leave Clarke behind either.

No matter what, he can never forget her last words. 

“Together” she said and he knows she meant is as a goodbye, as an “I love you” as a “Hold on, I’m not leaving you. Ever.” but a part of him always felt like she’s meant it as a “I’ll see you soon.” 

They’ve always done everything together, as a whole. He’d always thought dying would be the same, even if he wanted her to live to a hundred at the very least, even if he’d be long gone. 

Except he wasn’t.

He’d thought about killing himself on many occasions after her death but he was sure she’d come back to kick his ass if he as much of makes a scratch on his wrists so he gave it up quickly.

Often times, he would wake up in the morning with his heart beating out of his chest and he’d known it’d be a bad day, that he shouldn’t exert himself or overwork himself. 

Still, he’d test the limits. 

He’d go out on purpose and chop woods or work in the garden out in the sun all day and his heart would feel like giving up but it’d still come back from it. It’d still..keep on beating. He even passed out once and he saw her in the kitchen, telling him what an idiot he’s being and he never gambled with it again. 

But he knew it was coming. As the years passed and he watched Lea grow before his eyes, he knew. 

When she was five and she started kindergarten, they began working on this project. 

He had found one of Clarke’s old sketching books and the idea came to him unexpectedly. 

He asked of a Trishanakru grounder to make him a big leather bound book with white sheets, then he sat Lea down with him on the old kitchen table and he told her a story-their story. 

They’d write it down and attach Clarke’s drawings accordingly. 

Lea would love it, she’d listen to him with interest, ask questions, she’d even try to draw stuff herself and he’d put them in even if they were children’s sketches, they mattered.

They would work on it whenever Lea came by, it would be her favorite activity and when she was seven and was capable of reading and writing herself, he’d dictate stuff or let her read from it before they went to bed. 

He would be the first one to fall asleep now, not her, feeling himself growing more and more tired with every day.

They finished the book on a sunny July evening, when the night was young and so hot that all the windows were opened so the fresh breeze would come in and let them breathe. 

“But what about the rest of the pages, grandpa?” Lea had asked after marveling their hard two-year work for the past hour. She went through the empty pages that still composed half of the binder.

“Those are for the stories to come. Your father’s and yours and your children’s one day.” he says quietly and kisses her cheek. “Now off my lap, you’re too big to sit in your grandpa.”

“Can I take it with me?”

And usually he would’ve disagreed, insisted she kept it here, so they could keep working on it. But now that it was done and they had written it all, there was nothing left to add or do. 

He smiles.

“Of course. It’s yours. Keep it safe.”

“Thanks, grandpa!” she hugs him tightly and he rubs soothing circles on her back. 

“Now go get ready, your father will be here to take you soon.” 

He watches her leave that night with one hand gripping her father’s and the other clutching the leather book. 

She still tears up whenever she leaves him but he tries to give her his most reassuring smile and wave back from the porch of their old cabin.

He showers, trims his hair, brushes the stubborn white curls away, trying to tame them. 

He even laughs when he thinks of how they used to piss Clarke off whenever she was trying to get them looking semi-decent for an official event at camp like a wedding or a funeral. 

He shaves his beard, puts on a clean shirt, that old blue one that Clarke just adored, and his black washed out pants and then he goes to bed.

With a smile on his face, he closes his eyes and thinks to himself “Together now, princess. Together.”

They find him in the morning with the rays of the hot burning summer sun playing on his cold freckled face, making it look as if the stars of the universe were meeting the sunrise for the very first time.


End file.
